sound him; leave me to do
the thing--and, above all, don't thwart his game at the Thuilliers'."

Theodose had laid a finger on a sore sport in Flavie Colleville's heart;
and this requires an explanation, which may, perhaps, have the value of
a synthetic glance at women's life.

At forty years of age a woman, above all, if she has tasted the poisoned
apple of passion, undergoes a solemn shock; she sees two deaths before
her: that of the body and that of the heart. Dividing women into two
great categories which respond to the common ideas, and calling them
either virtuous or guilty, it is allowable to say that after that fatal
period they both suffer pangs of terrible intensity. If virtuous, and
disappointed in the deepest hopes of their nature--whether they have had
the courage to submit, whether they have buried their revolt in their
hearts or at the foot of the altar--they never admit to themselves that
all is over for them without horror. That thought has such strange and
diabolical depths that in it lies the reason of some of those apostasies
which have, at times, amazed the world and horrified it. If guilty,
women of that age fall into one of several delirious conditions which
often turn, alas! to madness, or end in suicide, or terminate in some
with passion greater than the situation itself.

The following is the "dilemmatic" meaning of this crisis. Either they
have known happiness, known it in a virtuous life, and are unable to
breathe in any air but that surcharged with incense, or act in any but a
balmy atmosphere of flattery and worship,--if so, how is it possible
to renounce it?--or, by a phenomenon less rare than singular, they
have found only wearying pleasures while seeking for the happiness
that escaped them--sustained in that eager chase by the irritating
satisfactions of vanity, clinging to the game like a gambler to his
double or quits; for to them these last days of beauty are their last
stake against despair.

"You have been loved, but never adored."

That speech of Theodose, accompanied by a look which read, not into her
heart, but into her life, was the key-note to her enigma, and Flavie
felt herself divined.

The lawyer had merely repeated ideas which literature has rendered
trivial; but what matter where the whip comes from, or how it is made,
if it touches the sensitive spot of a horse's hide? The emotion was in
Flavie, not in the speech, just as the noise is not in the avalanche,
though i